Happy New Year! Best wishes for a good life.

Happy New Year! Best wishes for a good life.

What can we wish for the New Year? We are all convinced that it should be well living, though we all don’t agree with the significance of it.
If we should do a research about the meaning of good life, we can have several answers: from a big amount of money, to physical wellness, to the lovers of the day, to success in TV or in his own career, to serenity, to the desired job position, to generosity towards the others, to overwhelming of the opponents and something more.
However all around there are insecurity and discomfort about future and because of all the problems of everyday life the idea of well living is not clear and not always the same
Sometimes it can seem a sheer utopianism.
Well living is not in a lottery, and obviously it is not in cocaine assumption or in a marijuana cigarette or in alcohol drinking. You can’t find it in the Big Brother or in similar TV programs. You can’t find it in a brothel or in a gambling house.
It’s the life that you must conquest, towards you should address yourself supported by a good education and a positive environment.
The promptness of Italian bishops dedicated their pastoral commitments in the next decades to education and good life. It is a project and a reflection condensed in the document “Educate to good life of the Gospel” published recently. They explicitly refer to a “new life characterized from everything is beauty, good and true” and they invite Christendom to come to an agreement to train “solid people, able to cooperate with the others and give a positive meaning to their own life” by the light of the “good novel” that Jesus gave to humanity.
Give sense to his own life! This is today the big challenge. Bishops say it to us, but also expertises in social and training problems say that. Without the right meaning there is no direction and we go all around as night butterflies from one light to another, with foolishness, agonizing looking for scraps of happiness. “People – It’s highlighted in the document – find difficult to give a deep meaning to existence. Symptoms are confusion, bending and narcissism, the insatiable desire of owning and of consuming, the research of sex out of love and out of any durable relationship for life, anxiety and fear, inability of hope, the diffusion of unhappiness and of depression… Causes of this discomfort are several – Cultural, social and economical – but at the bottom of everything there is the refuse of a transcendental vocation of men and of that fundamental relation that gives significance to all the others: without God a man doesn’t know the path and doesn’t understand who he is.”
Thus, there can’t be good life without a plan that directs people lives and institutions. A good life doesn’t depend on bending, on absence of values, on phenomenal and on extempore, on sloth and on contemporary opinions. Sometimes opinions are transcendent and misleading.
Lead people to believe in nothing, to consider that only opinions can orient doesn’t permit the good life because opinions are often changeable and joined to personal interests of the barker on duty. Do you remember The Piper of Hamelin?
The good life can’t depend on hic et nunc, on everything easy and fast, on live from day to day. It can’t be a helped wasted life. It should be supported from deep values and from effective commitment. This is based on real life, a value that we have to promote and defend.
It is sustained from discernment, responsibility and generous commitment. It lets interact rationality and affection. It is fertile of ability of giving himself to the others. It is rooted in good, in wisdom and knowledge, as well as justice.
We can still hear the invitation that the Pope Benedict XVI directed to young people during his last visit in Palermo: “Be trees that deep their roots in the river of good! Do not fear to contrast evil! Together you will be able to give fruits and life and to renew in a deep way your life!”
For a good life we need a project, we need paths to reach our goals, we need horizons and high ideals, skills that grow every day, coherent actions, meaningful and effective interactions. We need valid referral points. We need a deep hope that can support our everyday life, our training to hard work, the clearness of our goals, our ability to join with good friends and to direct our path if we lose it.
We are all called to be builder of good life – alone, with our families, at school, in the churches, in the associations, in the institutions – avoiding any disengagement, and indifference, auto referral, fragmented, extemporary, flashy and alienating plans.
We are all called to realize and support valid places and meaningful actions of development that drive young people in the growth and in the achievement of coherent life styles with real, personal and common good (and associations are good resources for this).
We are all called to ask ourselves about our way of living and about the goodness of our institutions. We are all called to our responsibility in education.
It is a big challenge – first of all for us adults – that brings our coherence, ability and bravery of educating ourselves and young people in going towards a better future, into question.
Everyone should be a clear and believable sign of hope and of good life, every time and everywhere!
This is my best and sincere wish for next New Year.


Giovanni Perrone